Piracy isn’t about preservation. Piracy doesn’t create the roms. It’s the dudes with rom dump devices who do that. And making archival copies isn’t necessarily piracy.
But yes, piracy is the only practical way for new customers to access older content that is no longer sold.
Didn’t Reddit gold start as just a user-run bot, that kept a tally of how many times it had been invoked for any particular recipient?
And then Reddit forced the bot to retire so they could offer a paid version. And now they’re retiring their mandatory replacement. Good job Reddit.